Baltimore Evening Sun (1 July 1913): 6.

The Hon. William H. Anderson, hotly pursued by an unescapable retribution, now seeks to justify his late debauching of the rev. clergy on the ground that both he and the clergy represent “the same constituency” and that it is impossible, under the law, for fellow-servants to bribe one another. Idle bosh! The fact is, of course, that the Hon. Mr. Anderson and the clergy represent quite separate, distinct and antagonistic constituencies. The former is trying to get money out of the churches for the use and benefit of the Anti-Saloon League and its employes, whose livelihood depends upon his success. The latter, if they are faithful to their trust, are trying to protect their flocks as much as possible from such benign extortions.

The existence of this antagonism of interest is plainly shown by the heat with which the Hon. Mr. Anderson denounces those clergymen who protect their flocks extra well--that is to say, those who refuse to let him pass the plate. He excoriates these alert and honest men even more savagely than he excoriates the brewers; in every number of the American Issue they are bawled out with vigor and threatened with mysterious and awful penalties. That free trip to Columbus was offered as a secret reward to the less faithful clergy. It was in the nature of honest graft for services rendered--not to the churches, but to the Anti-Saloon League. In so far as those services were valuable to the Anti-Saloon League they were costly to the churches. Their purpose was to divert money from legitimate religious uses to the coffers of the Anti-Saloon League, which will use it for the support of a lobby at Annapolis, for the payment of professional spellbinders and slanderers, and for the printing and circulation of inaccurate and libellous literature. If such a use of money is now regarded as a religious use, then it is high time for the Turks to begin sending missionaries to Christendom.

The Hon. Willam E. Lankford, superintendent of the House of Correction, in defense of a current charge:

I whipped Ijams with no idea of harming him, and I did not harm hin. My mother has whipped me many times harder than I whipped him. He was a mischievous boy, and as such had to be punished.

Terrible! Terrible! Can it be that the Hon. Mr. Lankford has not heard of the new science of penalogy, that sweetest shoot of the New Thought, and of its pious doctrine that the way to reform a roguish little darky is to read him from “Science and Health”? Is he so clothed in darkness that he is not hep to the latest discoveries of the “experts”? Has the great wave of the uplift passed over him without wetting him?

The letter of the Hon. Charles G. Mahon, printed in today’s Letter Column, is a shining example of that pious and vapid bosh which now passes current in Baltimore, at least in certain quarters, for sound and intelligent argument. Because I argue that a melodramatic war upon prostitution, led by misguided enthusiasts and supported by mountebanks and pornographers, will make prostitution an even more worse evil than it is today--because of this objection, I am accused of being in favor of prostitution. And because I protest against railroading two men to prison for the abominable crime of trading in women when their actual offense was simply adultery--an offense punishable in Maryland, a very moral State, by a maximum fine of $10, with no alternative of imprisonment--because of this, I am accused of condoning and “conniving” at their misdeed. Nothing could be more unfair and ridiculous--and yet nothing could more admirably reveal the state of mind existing among certain ecstatic whoopers and blood-letters of our fair city.

The claim is often made, as the Hon. Mr. Mason makes it, that the vice crusaders seek to save the women of the Tenderloin, and not to pursue and punish them. In this claim there is not one per. cent. of truth. The principal vice crusaders constantly speak of their enterprise as a holy war, they are constantly appealing to the police for armed aid, and their whole campaign has for its immediate object the piling up of penalties, the ruthless infliction of punishments, the bold denial of all the common human rights of their victims. A few broken-down helpless women, unable to escape with the majority, fall into their hands, and are exhibited as affecting prisonors of war. But they have no mercy for the woman who protests, perhaps with sound justice, against the terms of their conquest. And they have no mercy for the man who objects, perhaps in all honesty and good citizenship, against the quack remedies they propose to force down the public gullet, and their studied and dangerous demoralization of the police, and their intolerant attacks upon all who presume to dispute their infallibility.

I have no apologies to offer to the Hon. Mr. Mason or to any other such amateur theologian for arguing that all this violence and buncombe is not Christianity. Nor have I any apologies to offer for arguing that the scheme of reform proposed by these crusaders, even putting it in the best light possible, is ineffective, unintelligent, disingenuous and preposterous. In the first position I am supported by four-fifths of the educated and reflective Christian laymen of Baltimore and by all save a small and inconsequential minority of the clergy. And in the second position I find specific support in policies formulatd, after the most patient inquiry and consideration, by the judges of the Supreme Bench of Baltimore city and in the published opinions of an overwhelming majority of the Mayors, directors of public safety and chiefs of police of the larger American cities. If these gentlemen are moved by a personal “antipathy toward conditions such as would prevail in a thoroughly Christianized community,” then I am not ashamed to admit the same antipathy.

The civilized citizens of Baltimore, unless I err grievously, are fast growing tired of quackery in Christianity, as they are fast growing tired of quackery in sociology. It seems to be the opinion of certain eager press agents in our midst, both lay and clerical, that a loud and impudent claim to a monopoly in piety is identical with piety itself. That view is rendered ridiculous by the careers of its supporters. The public is not such an ass that it cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw. It knows the difference between those hard-working clergymen who devote themselves diligently to the cure of souls in their own appointed fields and those theatrical and stentorian dominies who neglect that plain (and often crying) duty to dabble in politics and stir up the animals. These last good men lack sense, and what is worse, they lack humor. If sinners snicker at them, the fault is all their own.